The first round of the 2023 Hackaday Prize closes next Tuesday, March April 25th. If you’ve got an educational project – whether that’s a robot technique you just need to share, or an instructional radio build – you’ve got this weekend left to get your project into shape, whip up a Hackaday.io page in support, and enter. The top 10 projects get a $500 prize award, and a chance to win the big prizes in the final round. You want to get your project in now.
But there is still room for your project! And with the deadline closing in, your best bet at the $500 prize money relies on you burning a bit of the midnight oil this weekend, but Hackaday glory awaits those who do.
Watching an anthill brings an air of fascination. Thousands of ants are moving about and communicating with other ants as they work towards a goal as a collective whole. For us humans, we project a complex inner world for each of these tiny creatures to drive the narrative. But what if we could peer down into a miniature world and the ants spoke English? (PDF whitepaper)
Researchers at the University of Stanford and Google Research have released a paper about simulating human behavior using multiple Large Language Models (LMM). The simulation has a few dozen agents that can move across the small town, do errands, and communicate with each other. Each agent has a short description to help provide context to the LLM. In addition, they have memories of objects, other agents, and observations that they can retrieve, which allows them to create a plan for their day. The memory is a time-stamped text stream that the agent reflects on, deciding what is important. Additionally, the LLM can replan and figure out what it wants to do.
The question is, does the simulation seem life-like? One fascinating example is the paper’s authors created one agent (Isabella) intending to have a Valentine’s Day party. No other information is included. But several agents arrive at the character’s house later in the day to party. Isabella invited friends, and those agents asked some people.
A demo using recorded data from an earlier demo is web-accessible. However, it doesn’t showcase the powers that a user can exert on the world when running live. Thoughts and suggestions can be issued to an agent to steer their actions. However, you can pause the simulation to view the conversations between agents. Overall, it is incredible how life-like the simulation can be. The language of the conversation is quite formal, and running the simulation burns significant amounts of computing power. Perhaps there can be a subconscious where certain behaviors or observations can be coded in the agent instead of querying the LLM for every little thing (which sort of sounds like what people do).
There’s been an exciting trend of combining LLMs with a form of backing store, like combining Wolfram Alpha with chatGPT. Thanks [Abe] for sending this one in!
The Vintage Computer Festival East took place last weekend at the InfoAge Science and History Museum in New Jersey, and by any metric you care to use, it was a phenomenal success. Everyone you spoke with, from the the exhibitors and attendees, to the veteran volunteers who put this incredible show together, all said the same thing: they’d never seen a turnout like this before.
Of course, such success is not without cost. The exhibit rooms were so packed that moving through them was a challenge, the line to get food or browse the consignment area occasionally stretched outside the building, and at one point the event’s electronic payment system buckled under the pressure.
Some things are worth the wait.
Yet even the folks who waited the better part of an hour to rummage through boxes of dusty treasures, only to find themselves left standing with armfuls of heavy gear they couldn’t pay for until the technical issues were resolved couldn’t really complain. I should know, I was one of them. It would be like going to a concert and getting upset that the music was too loud — the event was advertised as a festival, and that’s exactly what it was.
No matter where you went, you’d find throngs of excited people who were eager to chat about the golden age of computing. So even if you were stuck in a long line, or had to step outside of the exhibit area to get some fresh air, you were always in excellent company. Seeing such a large and diverse number of people come out for what’s ultimately a niche event was exceptionally gratifying. At the end of the day, if the price we have to pay for this kind of community response is a few long lines and tight squeezes, it’s well worth it.
Each time I cover an event like this for Hackaday, I do so with the caveat that there’s really no substitute for being there in person. No matter how many articles you read and YouTube recaps you watch, you’ll never be able to see all the things you would have had you been able to walk the show floor yourself. It’s a bit like exploring the Moon or Mars: remotely controlled robots are capable of capturing terabytes of data and beaming it back to Earth, but even still, there’s the potential to learn so much more by putting boots on the ground.
The same is true of VCF East 2023 — what I bring you here is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what was on display at this year’s event. On the other hand, you have the advantage of being able to peruse these images without having to stand in line. Is it worth the trade? Only you can be the judge of that. But for my money, I’ll gladly get back in line when VCF East 2024 rolls around.
In a lot of ways, it seems like we’re in the “plateau of productivity” part of the hype cycle when it comes to drones. UAVs have pretty much been reduced to practice and have become mostly an off-the-shelf purchase these days, with a dwindling number of experimenters pushing the envelope with custom builds, like building drones out of dead birds.
These ornithopomorphic UAVs come to us from the New Mexico Insitute of Mining and Technology, where [Mostafa Hassanalian] runs the Autonomous Flight and Aquatic Systems lab. While looking into biomimetics, [Dr. Hassanalian] hit upon the idea of using taxidermy birds as an airframe for drones. He and his team essentially reverse-engineered the birds to figure out how much payload they’d be able to handle, and added back the necessary components to make them fly again.
From the brief video in the tweet embedded below, it’s clear that they’ve come up with a huge variety of feathered drones. Some are clearly intended for testing the aerodynamics of taxidermy wings in makeshift wind tunnels, while others are designed to actually fly. Propulsion seems to run the gamut from bird-shaped RC airplanes with a propeller mounted in the beak to true ornithopters. Some of the drones clearly have a conventional fuselage with feathers added, which makes sense for testing various subsystems, like wings and tails.
It’s easy to mock something like this, and the jokes practically write themselves. But when you think about it, the argument for a flying bird-shaped robot is pretty easy to make from an animal behavior standpoint. If you want to study how birds up close while they’re flying, what better way than to send in a robot that looks similar to the other members of the flock? And besides, evolution figured out avian flight about 150 million years ago, so studying how birds do it is probably going to teach us something.
Swap out the TW BOY for a smartphone and this photo wouldn’t be nearly as good.
The “TW BOY”, as it is known, runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, which includes a WiFi chip on board for easy internet connectivity. A Python script was charged with fetching Tweets for viewing using the now-dead Twitter API. Dithering was used to display color images on the 320×240 monochrome screen. Everything was wrapped up in a tidy 3D-printed housing to complete the look. The device uses two action buttons, and four directional buttons for navigation. It’s the layout popularized by the original Game Boy, and it looks super cute here, too.
The project was built as [NEKOPLA] has a penchant for single-use devices, due to their solitary focuses on doing one thing well. We can appreciate that ethos, and we love the final product, even if Twitter decreed it would no longer work. (Time to move on to Mastodon?) More images after the break.
The 20th century saw everything from telephones to computers become mainstream. Many of these devices were beautifully designed in the mid-century period, something that’s hard to say about a lot of today’s cheaper technology. [John Graham-Cumming] has shown us one exquisite example, with his teardown of a simple Czech telephone.
The model in question is a DS3600 telephone built by Tesla Stropkov in the early 1980s. Despite this, it’s a design that looks like it hails more from the 1960s based on its smooth curves and rounded features. It’s a rotary dial phone, though a push-button version was also produced.
Inside the phone is a simple single-sided PCB clearly marked out with a tidy silkscreen. The ringer and a few capacitors make up the bulk of the circuitry inside the base, along with the rotary dial. The handset itself plays host to most of the other componentry, including the mystery “WNB 068 hybrid circuit” which [John] couldn’t positively identify.
It’s great to get a look inside vintage hardware and see how things were done in yesteryear. It’s particularly funny to think about how simple telephones used to be in contrast to today.
The languages we speak influence the way that we see the world, in ways most of us may never recognize. For example, researchers report seeing higher savings rates among people whose native language has limited capacity for a future tense, and one Aboriginal Australian language requires precise knowledge of cardinal directions in order to speak at all. And one Alaskan Inuit language called Iñupiaq is using its inherent visual nature to reshape the way children learn and use mathematics, among other things.
Arabic numerals are widespread and near universal in the modern world, but except perhaps for the number “1”, are simply symbols representing ideas. They require users to understand these quantities before being able to engage with the underlying mathematical structure of this base-10 system. But not only are there other bases, but other ways of writing numbers. In the case of the Iñupiaq language, which is a base-20 system, the characters for the numbers are expressed in a way in which information about the numbers themselves can be extracted from their visual representation.
This leads to some surprising consequences, largely that certain operations like addition and subtraction and even long division can be strikingly easy to do since the visual nature of the characters makes it obvious what each answer should be. Often the operations can be seen as being done to the characters themselves, instead of in the Arabic system where the idea of each number must be known before it can be manipulated in this way.
This project was originally started as a way to make sure that the Iñupiaq language and culture wasn’t completely lost after centuries of efforts to eradicate it and other native North American cultures. But now it may eventually get its own set of Unicode characters, meaning that it could easily be printed in textbooks and used in computer programming, opening up a lot of doors not only for native speakers of the language but for those looking to utilize its unique characteristics to help students understand mathematics rather than just learn it.
